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As Mobile World Congress continues on in Barcelona, I thought I'd take a quick pause to celebrate, in video, what have to be the undisputed stars of the show: Samsung's Galaxy S6, S6 Edge and HTC's One M9.

It will be $299 USD (~370CAN) beginning in Q2 2015. It will be available in the US and Canada

Here are the specs:

6", 1920 x 1080 TFT

built-in stylus

LTE

2Ghz octa-core Mediatek MT6592 SoC

2GB RAM

16GB storage

MicroSD

13 MP rear-facing camera

5MP front-facing camera

3100mAh battery

Cyanogen OS 11 with Android 4.4.4

160.5mm x 81.6mm x 7.9mm

The 6" 1920x1080 display will be plenty sharp and 2GB of RAM should be enough for everyone.

16GB of storage is also a plus and if that isn't enough, there's a MicroSD.

Actually, the guts sound pretty similar to the Idol X+ I reviewedlast year. The performance of the MT6592 octa-core SoC slots in between a Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 and 600 so it should be sufficient for most users.

With the Samsung Galaxy S6 and HTC M9 officially official, I've been pouring through some other news from Mobile World Congress, happening right now in Barcelona. And as news goes this is pretty big: Cyanogen, Inc. and Qualcomm have inked a deal wherein Cyanogen will provide the software for upcoming Qualcomm Reference Devices.

This does not mean that the Qualcomm equivalent of a Nexus is going on sale anytime soon. Rather than paraphrase I'll let Android Central explain:

Qualcomm makes special devices with each of its chipset launches called Qualcomm Reference Devices, or QRDs. Think of it like a whitebox program, where Qualcomm provides everything necessary for a company to slap its branding on the side and call it their own. There are hundreds of these devices in the world today, made by dozens of different manufacturers. Qualcomm's program makes it so these manufacturers can "make" and sell a device in as little as 60 days, instead of the months and months a from-scratch hardware launch takes. Most of these devices aren't particularly fun to use, due in many cases to the software.

So in other words, a lot of those dreary low and mid-range Android devices are about to get a lot better!
...

HTC just announced the new HTC One M9 - or is it the newer HTC One M9. There's a quick chart comparing last year's M8 and the M9 after the jump.

No doubt, the M9 will also compete with the just announced Samsung Galaxy S6. While the GS6 has the bigger 'specs'; 5.1 vs 5.0" screen, DDR4, HD display vs Quad HD, blah blah blah, to me, the M9's are more sensible.

The GS6 has to push almost 2x as many pixels which will have an affect on graphics performance and battery life. Also, on a 5-ish inch display, most people will find that 1920x1080 and 2560x1440 are just as sharp as each other.

Don't forget, that the GS6 also has a smaller battery (2550 or 2600 vs 2840mAh) that's no longer removable plus it has to run a power sucking Super AMOLED display. I don't care what Samsung says about AMOLED display using less power, my experience is that they are more power hungry because they usually have to be turned up.

Still, it's much easier to market a 2560x1440 display over a 1920x1080.

The M9 also comes with a MicroSD slot and a generous 32GB of storage. With the S6 you'll have to pick whether you want 32/64/128GB and be stuck with that.

Both have metal bodies. The GS6 does come with some extras like a fingerprint reader (pretty useful), a heart rate monitor (not really useful), while the M9 has stereo speakers which if they're anything like the M8, should be excellent. It should be interesting to see which phone is better.
...

Samsung just announced successors to the Galaxy S5, the Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge. They're almost identical but the 6 Edge's screen curves down on the sides. After the jump is a quick comparison of the GS5, GS6 and GS6 Edge.

The big difference is that Samsung has ditched the plastic body for metal. The screen is higher resolution though I doubt it looks any sharper than the GS5's - they're just keeping up with the competition in this regard. 3GB of RAM is a nice upgrade plus it's faster DDR4 RAM instead of DDR3. The camera now has optical image stabilization while the front-facing camera has been bumped to 5 megapixels.

One of Samsung's calling cards is that their phones come with memory card slots. So I was surprised that Samsung has followed Apple's strategy and ditched the memory card slot. You can get the GS6/6 Edge with 32/64 or 128GB of UFS 2.0 (a faster type of built-in storage). Fortunately, the base 32GB model is already a good size unlike the 16GB iPhone 6 and 6 Plus which are way too small and should never have been introduced to the market.

Another big change is that the battery is now built-in. In fact, while the GS5 comes with a 2800mAh battery, the GS6 comes only comes with a 2550 while 6 Edge, a 2600mAh battery. I'm guessing that since the battery will probably last the day, that's enough for Samsung.

Finally, unlike the GS5, the GS6 and 6 Edge aren't water resistant. This is a real shame, I'm guessing Samsung will make a GS6 Active later that is water resistant - this actually makes more sense as it was kind of hard to describe the difference between the GS5 and GS5 Active.

All, in all, except for the removal of removable battery, storage and to a lesser extent, the smaller battery there aren't any real big surprises. I guess the lack of a Qualcomm SoC is a bit of a surprise but this isn't something a user is going to notice.
...

2014 was supposed to be the year of the wearable. While 2014 did see a whole slew of wearables hit the market and to a lesser degree, gain some mainstream acceptance, wearables didn’t take off like many thought they would.

One reason is that even though there’s a lot of momentum in the category - for many people, they just found that the trade offs of having a wearable didn’t outweigh the benefit having one would bring to their daily lives.

Here’s the Samsung Gear S, one of the first wearables from a mainstream manufacturer that has a built-in SIM card slot which allows it to get a data connection even when your phone isn’t around.

Is built in wireless the killer feature that wearables have been waiting for? Let’s check it out:
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Yesterday the FCC voted 3-2 in favour of Title II-based net neutrality rules, a decision which has implications for mobile users, members accessing these forums via their home broadband connection... Internet users in general, really, and far beyond the confines of the USA. I've been pouring through the news on this since the vote came down yesterday, and thought I'd share some of the more interesting bits here.

What's Title II Again?

Title II is about the idea of common carriage, first applied to telephone networks in the FCC's Communications Act of 1934, and overhauled with the Telecommunications Act of 1996. The idea is pretty simple: a network provider must treat everything on their network equally. The best non-Internet example that I can think of is the explosion of long distance providers here in Canada during the 1990s. And the Internet? Well, you've probably seen this fake ISP ad before.

Verizon's Cheeky Response

As expected, Internet providers in the United States weren't exactly thrilled with the news. Verizon went so far as to post their official response in Morse code... because common carriage is such an antiquated notion, amirite? Anyone?
...

Android users seething over Apple's sudden success with Apple Pay might get some good news this spring: If the tip received by Ars Technica turns out to be true, an upgraded tap-and-pay solution called Android Pay will be announced at this year's Google I/O developer conference.

The big innovation that Android Pay will bring to the current Google Wallet is an API enabling the user to access Wallet from within any app that supports it. For example, if you were redeeming a coupon from the 7-Eleven app you could pay for the entire purchase with Google Wallet, without leaving the 7-Eleven app.

Android Pay has been partly made possible by Google's recent acquisition of SoftCard, a failed mobile payment system created by a partnership of US carriers. And no doubt some of it has to do with the looming spectre of Apple Pay, even though some Android users—at least in the USA—have been able to tap and pay with Google Wallet for years. An added bonus of the SoftCard deal is that Wallet/Android Pay may see a wider release on carrier-branded phones.
...

Yesterday Canadian carrier TELUS launched a campaign in partnership with the Canadian Government's "Get Cyber Safe" initiative called #BeAppSafe.

"Cyber"? Really...?

Among other things the campaign seeks to educate smartphone users about app permissions—and I'm all about protecting your data from egregious app permissions. Rather than just copy and paste the press release from TELUS, I'm going to go a bit further and share some additional privacy-related stuff that I've been sitting on for a bit. There's a lot to get to, so let's get to it!
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If you squint just a bit you can see the capacitive buttons on my OnePlus One, when I first unboxed it last July. I never thought I'd actually be using them, as I've grown quite accustomed to the on-screen buttons present on every Nexus since the Galaxy. But thanks to some clever innovations on my latest custom ROM—and, unfortunately, a key shortcoming—I'm now living, and loving, the capacitive life.

The ROM in question is SlimKat, which I've written about before. The bad news is that I can't completely disable the capacitive buttons even if I wanted to. I can easily turn off the backlight but if I press anywhere on the chin the corresponding button press will still register. There is a high-level workaround that would involve putting a custom script into my /system/etc/init.d folder. Sounds sketchy.

The good news is that I can do a lot more with the capacitive buttons than I would have thought!
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In case you needed one more reason to take control of your Android experience, today I'm posting a quick screenshot tour of Team Win's Recovery Project—aka TWRP. I got the idea after my frustrations last week with the latest OTA for my OnePlus One. I'll not mince words here: most stock recoveries for Android are crap. Boot into your typical recovery and you'll have next to no idea of what's going on, much less any say in it.